whoisthemachine

Maybe you can safely believe it was all just a nightmare... certainly sounds like one!

Ironically (and I'm not suggesting this is you), many folks who support such an approach (Elon included) balked at the idea of shutting things down during the height of Covid to reduce unnecessary deaths as a result of Covid (for example, hospitals being unable to help patients due to being overwhelmed with high Covid case counts).

I for one agree though, if self-driving can reduce deaths on aggregate then that's a good thing. I hope that self-driving cars give better signals to pedestrians though (maybe emitting noises less startling the car honks) - I think this would vastly improve the safety when a self-driving car is navigating a parking lot or busy downtown roads.

Red Hat?

Agreed. I can't help but think that giving normal, technical users a great browser, and then catering on bended knee to enterprises for a very controllable, supported, extended version as the source of revenue that supports the normal browser is a sustainable model. Maybe not a model that takes over the world, but one that sustains development of a good open source browser.

I agree entirely with your reasoning. But just watching what has happened to numerous Google products in the last decade (perhaps starting with Google reader?), it has become clear to me that Google's ad revenue is what wags the dog, so to speak, regardless of long-term considerations.

Google making baffling decisions is hardly news these days. The main decision driver at Google is whether that resource/product improves ad revenue. I have a hard time seeing how Google Cloud would drive ad revenue, which likely means leadership at Google doesn't either.

I just wish Google's leadership would stop starting projects (and hiring smart people to develop those projects) when they know the projects will not drive their goal of more ad revenue.

How big of a power draw is a touch screen? I would think that's a solved problem given the plethora of touch devices we have.

Wow some other great use cases - thanks for mentioning these. I do also use the touchscreen when playing among us, it gives the game a more tactile feel, while you still have a full keyboard for the requisite chatting.

It's actually very nice, you can scoot the laptop closer to you while lounging on a couch, and scroll the screen naturally with your thumb. Again, reading long articles is my common use-case, but I've occasionally used it to read through large source files as well.

At least in the laptops I look at (mainly Thinkpads), yes it is a common feature.

Could you quantify this?

I'm waffling on my pre-order because I realized Frameworks don't have touchscreens, which I really enjoy when reading long articles. Kind of wild that they offer all these other features that seem very niche, but a common one these days is absent.

Engineers aren't immune from making poor judgment calls, but the second part - having no clue what you're talking about and not knowing when to just shut up and learn - is certainly a marker for a poor engineer in my experience.

Using virtual threads only, can one make a non-blocking UI application? Or do you still need to fall back to Promises or callbacks?

Can probably happen like it can happen with any dependency management system - if you set wildcard versions (or no version at all?), different systems can have different versions of the dependency cached. Eventually this can lead to surprise build failures.

This is the rare opportunity to share my little android side project, project blue: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lasthopeso...

It lets you stream from a nice desktop server product, JRiver Media Center [0], and it's sole purpose is to be an audio client to JRiver Media Center. It's main focus is on being lightweight and reliably streaming from your home server even on long drives, when your connection may be less than reliable.

[0] https://www.jriver.com/index.html

You can work without doing so for income.

The jet lag could be avoided by flying there for your meeting, and returning to your original time zone when it is over.

All good points. I think this is why the main customer they are courting for this use case is the US military, which doesn't care about many of those things in peace time, and would care even less in war time.

Maybe we should then pass laws restricting what companies can do with our data? What kinds of algorithms they can run if they want to be treated as a platform rather than a publisher?

Yes, sorry, I know I was stating the obvious. It's rare that we see that wealth publicized and it took me by surprise.

Basically the worth of a nation given to one family.

My instinct is that this is maybe similar - could it be the last desperate acts of a department or departments within Microsoft to justify their value?

Just recently, my partner's PC had to be wiped because BitLocker was surprise enabled by Windows 11, and I hadn't set her PC up with an online Microsoft login, so we couldn't get the BitLocker key that we never knew we needed.

So your data is now hostage to Microsoft, and if you didn't read the full manual when setting up your partner's new Windows PC, you now lost her data. Writing about it, it feels like ransomware, except I guess we don't have to pay anything yet, other than an account that Microsoft can gather metrics from.

This is a hard article to read, as you say, this man's a butcher.

> I don't remember ActiveX playing much of a part in the internet.

The large company I work for still mandates IE11. Why do you think that is? If your corporate strategy gets you 20-30 years of vendor lock-in, then I would say it was a successful strategy.

Netscape Navigator was also open sourced, so I am confused what a project being open source has to do with Microsoft's business strategy. We factually know that Netscape's downfall was a result of the EEE strategy [0]. Just because Netscape rushed to open source Netscape Navigator when they saw their market sharing falling doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't employ EEE. If Microsoft had bought Netscape once Netscape was losing money hand over fist, it still wouldn't mean that Microsoft hadn't used EEE to help bring Netscape to that point. Just because Microsoft no longer has the majority mindshare of the browser market, should we ignore that event, or say it was ineffective, when it was very effective and very profitable for many years?

It is just a business strategy, that's all. And it's one that Microsoft employed successfully, and which people who join likely learn of or know of, and some of whom try to emulate to be successful at Microsoft now. And many of us don't like the effect EEE has on our industry, when Microsoft or any other entity does it. And just because Atom may not fit the strategy exactly, doesn't mean the unmistakable parallels which I already mentioned should be ignored. I personally used Atom, but more than that, I liked the world more when there was more than just one Electron based editor competing out there in the world, and we are seeing the fruits of VSCode winning so completely (both good and bad), whether through aggressive corporate strategies or not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Yes, this was what I meant! For most users (at least for this user), it gives essentially the same outcome.

How is it different?

I guess as an end-user, I fail to see the difference. And it wasn't like Microsoft started developing Atom and then stopped it, they bought the company that started developing it, and shut it down in favor of their own product. And blaming it on the end-user because they fail to pick up a massive product like Atom and develop it themselves seems disingenuous at best.